Adultery & Other Choices (16 page)

Andromache

P
ETE AND BECKY
stayed up with her that night, until she thought she could sleep; then Pete went home and Becky slept with her. But Ellen woke three hours later when the couple next door returned from the New Year's Eve party at the Officers' Club. She heard car doors slamming and women's high laughter—there seemed to be two couples—then a man singing. She reached out, and her hand touched Becky's breast; she withdrew it and lay awake for the rest of the night. She thought of Posy, nine years old now, and perhaps in twenty years or even less she would go through this too. She thought of Ronnie, fatherless at five, and already so much like his father; but Ronnie wouldn't have to bear this: he was a man, so he would merely die. And she thought of Joe trying to reach the escape hatch as the plane dived faster toward earth.

They found Joe's body, but she never saw it, and the funeral was with closed caskets. Ellen sat erectly between Posy and Ronnie. She did not cry, though her mother and Joe's mother did: subdued but continual sobbing, while the two older men sat quietly, their faces transfixed in bewildered grief. Posy didn't cry, either. Ronnie sniffled once but Ellen whispered in his ear:
Be a strong Marine;
and he bit his lip and stared at Joe's casket, flanked by the caskets of the pilot and the crewman.

At the funeral Ellen learned that the enlist crewman, a petty officer, had been only twenty-four years old; so next day she called a friend at Navy Relief, asking her to check on his widow. He probably didn't have much insurance, Ellen said, and she may need money to get home. Then Ellen drove south with her parents, to Sacramento.

She found an apartment near a school for Posy, and started taking courses in shorthand and typing. She didn't try to make friends. Some nights she had a drink with a couple across the hall. They were in their late twenties, and they bored her. Gradually she realized that she was boring them too: her talk was of the Marine Corps—the Fleet Marine Force bases and travel and funny anecdotes—a world as alien to this odd flabby couple as theirs was to her.

On most nights she stayed in the apartment and watched television or read magazines. Or, when Posy and Ronnie were asleep, she looked at the photographs in her album or projected home movies on a portable screen. The pictures were painful, but she was glad she had taken them. For sometimes she could not remember Joe's face. His image often appeared in her mind but when she concentrated on it, tried to keep it there, it began to fade. Then she would look at a picture. If she were out of the apartment, she turned to one in her billfold. In that one he was wearing his green uniform and major's oak leaves. At home, she would hurry to the bedroom where an eight-by-ten colored photograph was on the dressing table: he wore blues and captain's bars. She had no pictures of Joe in civilian clothes, except in the movies.

It took her four months to look at the movie she had taken on Christmas Day: Ronnie and Posy with their presents and Joe sipping coffee and smiling and lighting a pipe; then he was running beside Ronnie, holding the bicycle seat, and three times she reversed the film and watched the moment when he released the bicycle and she had focused on his face as he called softly:
keep steering, Son, keep steering
—She began to cry, but she watched the rest: the sandwiches and cookies and punch bowl, the living room and Joe in his blues, and her clean kitchen.

She remembered an uncle's funeral when she was fifteen. His widow had spent almost an entire day at the funeral home, where his dead face was there to look at; it wasn't his real face, it was younger than Ellen had ever seen it, but it was dead. A woman could look at it, speak to it, touch it. But
she
couldn't. Her memories of Joe were alive: he was talking, he was smiling at her, he was stern, he was walking on the cold beach at Whidbey Island, or kissing her and going to the plane.

She went to the kitchen and made an Old Fashioned, then sat in the living room again, staring at the white movie screen. She wanted to talk, but not to the couple across the hall, or to the young girls in the business school, or to her mother. For she was thinking about Camp Pendleton and Marine wives:
Remember during Korea bow we'd read two papers every day, the morning and evening ones, and we'd be waiting for the mail as soon as we woke up in the morning, that was almost the first thing you thought about—except sometimes you woke up, mostly on Sundays when there's no mail, and you'd lie there thinking it'll always be like this: alone in the morning—but most days it was mail you thought about and you'd try to forget it because the postman wouldn't come until ten and about nine-fifteen or so you could see women opening their front doors and looking in the mailbox, sometimes even sticking a hand in it, then they'd look up and down the street. They'd have brooms or mops in their bands. They knew the mail hadn't come yet but they couldn't help looking—Oh, I was the same. Remember how it was? How terrible? But we made it, didn't we. We by God made it
—

The next day she wrote to Colonel James Harkness at Camp Pendleton, California. He answered within a week: he had taken action on her request, he wrote, and he could assure her that a position with Navy Relief would always be open for her. If she would notify him several weeks prior to her arrival, he would find quarters in Oceanside. He and Marcia looked forward to seeing her again, and the Corps had lost one of its finest officers.

She replied that she would be there in June, then she took the children to her mother's and told them she wanted to see Pete and Becky again before moving to Oceanside. As she told them this, she looked at Posy and wanted to say:
I'll send you to college in the midwest, far away from the Corps, and you can marry a man like that one across the ball, a man who—who what? A man you can live with
. But she said: ‘We'll do a lot of swimming there.'

Then she flew to Seattle. Pete and Becky met her at the airport; she sat between them in the car, and from Seattle to Deception Pass they talked about Whidbey Island friends and the weather. The sky was grey and the air damp and chilling. But when they approached Deception Pass, Ellen was silent. They rounded a curve and she looked at the grey roiling water and, across it, at the evergreens of Whidbey Island, and her heart quickened. She saw the rapids under the bridge, then they were on it: high above the Pass, and ahead of them were dark tall trees, and a winding blacktop road and, trembling, she lit a cigarette. Becky took her hand. As they left the bridge and entered the trees, Ellen said: ‘Pete, would you take me to the salvage area tomorrow?'

‘Sure.'

‘I want to see the plane. I never saw Joe, or the plane either. Did they bring it here?'

Pete said yes, they had; and Becky squeezed her hand.

T
WO DAYS
before Christmas, nine days before his death, Joe Forrest had come home in the evening while Ellen was in the kitchen, making pastries. He looked at them for a while, pausing over each tray as if he were inspecting the enlisted mess, tasted a couple of them, then said gently: ‘Make big cookies. The troops like big cookies.'

‘Oh, Joe,' she said, ‘do you really think I have to? What'll we do with these?'

‘We'll eat them,' he said, and mixed her a martini.

He went to the bedroom to take off his uniform, and she thought of him going through the ritual, carefully hanging the trousers and shirt on a wooden hangar, the blouse on another. Then he would spitshine the shoes, cordovans so heavily coated with polish now that his daily shining took hardly any time at all. He would finish by polishing the brass buckle and tip of his web belt, putting on a sport shirt and slacks, and then he would mix their second drinks. But she didn't wait for it. While he was still in the bedroom she called that she was going to Becky's for a minute and a roast was in the oven, but she'd be back before it was done.

Walking to Becky's, she looked through the windows of the officers' houses, all of them alike: picture windows and fireplaces and car ports, and cords of wood stacked outside. Though it wasn't six o'clock yet, the sky had been black for an hour. The wind was cold and damp, and she shivered. She always told Joe that she loved Whidbey Island and she told the officers' wives too; but she was from California and she hated the island and Puget Sound which enclosed it. She was certain that Joe felt the same, but he had been a Marine for too long and was cheerfully resigned to discomfort. She turned up the Crawfords' sidewalk, hurrying, her overcoat useless against the wind. Becky answered the door with a drink in her hand; they went to the living room, and Pete stood up.

‘Where's the old man?' he said.

‘Shining his shoes and drinking. What else do Marines do before dinner?'

Pete had been an ace in the Second World War and he was now a squadron commander. Ellen looked condescendingly at his uniform: he was wearing two-thirds of his Navy blues, having taken off his coat and tie and rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt.

‘Those pastries I spent all afternoon on,' she said to Becky. ‘The Major has just disapproved them.'

‘He
did
?'

Becky smiled, and her face wrinkled. She was a tall woman with bleached hair and a face that was lined and tan. She played golf nearly every day, even at Whidbey Island; she had said only snow could keep her away from golf, and if it ever snowed she might even paint the balls red and play in that.

‘Make big cookies,' Ellen said. ‘The troops like big cookies.'

Pete brought Ellen a Scotch and water, then put another log on the fire.

‘He'll probably tell me to make hot dogs too,' she said.

Pete was smiling at her.

‘What are they drinking?' he said.

‘Joe's making that rum punch.'

‘Drunk Marines in Officers' Country. You stay in the house, Becky.'

‘Maybe I won't. Who was that snappy one at the main gate today? About five o'clock.'

‘Langley,' Ellen said.

She knew them all. Joe had their photographs on the bulkhead in his office and each time a new man reported in, he brought the photograph home and showed it to her. When he had brought Langley's picture home she had studied it for a long while, speaking his name aloud, and thinking of
lanky
, because Joe said he was. A week later he was a gate sentry and as Ellen stopped the car she had rolled her window down; when he saluted she had smiled and said:
Good afternoon, Langley
. He had never seen her before, but he knew the Major's car, and for a moment after his salute they had grinned at each other, proudly.

‘He's darling,' Becky said.

The fresh log was burning now and its warmth reached Ellen's face.

‘He didn't salute when I drove through,' Pete said.

‘He didn't?' Ellen said. ‘Did you tell Joe?'

‘Oh, he's teasing. It was the sharpest salute he's had in weeks.'

‘They're
all
sharp,' Pete said. ‘I wish the Navy was like that.'

Becky brought an ash tray to Ellen. As she leaned over to place it on the arm of the chair, Ellen looked closely at her face. Then she glanced at Pete, who was talking about the old Navy when sailors had discipline. She was thinking that pilots' wives were a little better off—in the matter of aging anyway. Becky looked a year or two older than Pete, but at least they both appeared near middleage. Perhaps because of jet-flying, pilots aged nearly as quickly as their wives.

But not infantry officers: during peacetime Joe's work was almost relaxing, or Ellen thought so. He was outdoors more often than not—hiking, climbing hills, running—and his trouser size had increased only one inch since their wedding, while she had gone from size ten to twelve. Even at Whidbey Island, where he commanded a security barracks and his troops did little more than stand guard, Joe exercised daily: handball or running at noon. During his tours of infantry duty he went to the field for days or weeks and came back looking relaxed and sunburned, to tell her funny stories: a lieutenant who got lost, a king snake in the chaplain's sleeping bag…

To occupy herself during their separations, and also because it was expected of her, she was active in wives' clubs. At Whidbey Island she was their president, a good one and proud of it; she felt that she was like Joe: the senior Marine at a Naval air station, and she had impressed the rival service. At the Armed Forces Day cocktail party, she had invited the Admiral's wife to go riding with her.
But it won't be much of a ride
, she had said,
because all the horses are nags
. Then she had talked about that for ten minutes. Three weeks later there was a new petty officer in charge of the stables and the Admiral had appointed a full commander to buy horses. Through the Special Services Officer, Ellen had arranged for a ladies' night at the hobby shop on Tuesdays and the indoor swimming pool, which had been used solely for water survival training, on Thursdays, so that wives of deployed pilots could make pottery, and swim. She felt a special pity for pilots' wives. Their husbands were gone for seven months each year, flying from carriers in the Western Pacific. They flew A
₃
D's and it was rare when a year passed without at least one wife attending a corpseless memorial service.

Flames from the big log were reaching the chimney now, and Ellen leaned back in her chair, moving her face from the heat. Her legs were comfortably hot. Pete rose to mix another drink, but Ellen told him she had to leave.

‘I've had a break,' she said. ‘Now I can go back and be a Marine again.'

By the time she reached the sidewalk in front of the Crawfords' house, she was cold. The wind was stronger and she blinked and wiped her eyes. Across the island, on the west side, she could hear A
₃
D's taking off and climbing into the wet black sky.